Posts tagged:#Rap

We celebrated Project Myopia with a beautiful launch event towards the end of semester 2. It was a night of music and poetry, as well as an opportunity for some of our contributors to elaborate on their essays and ideas. Our performers touched on a wide range of serious issues: from the exclusion of racial minorities’ contribution to the canon of literature, to the oppressive nature of zero-hour contracts that prevent tutors from being able to fully engage in helping all students get ahead, let alone those from a minority background who need assistance most. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who performed and shared their experiences, and we also have to thank everyone who attended and helped us drink the wine we provided! Project Myopia aims to bring marginalized people together and amplify their voices, and our launch felt like a perfect culmination of our semester’s work: people came together and shared their experiences of an academic world we need to change.

Cashmere is a rap album by the ‘Swet Shop Boys’: a duo comprised of Riz Ahmed, a British actor, known for his work in ‘Four Lions’ and Heems, an American rapper, known for being a member of ‘Das Racist’, both are of South Asian descent. The Swet Shop Boys rap about contemporary social and political issues which face the South Asian diaspora, sound tracked by traditional music from the Indian Subcontinent.

I would like to advocate for the inclusion of the 2015 musical play Hamilton in the list of works available for study in the English Literature curriculum at the University of Edinburgh, particularly in contemporary theatre and American literature courses. Hamilton retells the life story of Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers, in the form of a hip-hop and R&B-style musical. Lin-Manuel Miranda, the play’s creator, is an American composer of Puerto Rican heritage. He plays the title character in the New York production, whose cast is almost solely made up of actors of African American, Latin American or Asian American heritage.